ABC Commuters
They have successfully managed to bury what’s happened, and there’s an effort now to rewrite history.
Emily Yates, ABC Commuters
Unlike previous disputes over DOO in the 1980s and 1990s, new digital technology has enabled the current industrial action to be played out on social media.
Aggrieved passengers have been able to target their anger at unions and/or operators more directly and instantaneously than before - elevating the plight of Southern, Northern and other rail users beyond the confines of regional news coverage, and generating interest far beyond affected communities.
New user groups have been formed, to apply additional pressure on all parties to negotiate a lasting settlement. These include ABC Commuters, which has quickly gained a Twitter following of nearly 7,000.
ABC Commuters has managed to shine a light on the RMT and ASLEF disputes with Southern in particular, having invented the popular hashtag # southernfail and even sourcing £ 50,000 in crowdfunding to launch legal action against the Department for Transport.
This Judicial Review has been sought in relation to the delay taken by DfT to enforce contractual breaches on Govia Thameslink Railway, incurred by the large number of cancellations on Southern services in summer 2016.
GTR invoked a force majeure clause in its contract to try to protect itself from being penalised financially for the breaches, which it blamed on a large increase in illness among conductors and a lack of staff availability, followed by an accusation that a stealth-like ‘sick-note strike’ was being conducted by staff in parallel to RMT’s official dispute with Southern.
On June 22 2017, senior railwayman Chris Gibb published a report into the poor performance on Southern, in which unions were partially blamed for “undermining the system integrity”. But ABC Commuters campaigner Emily Yates believes that this too easily lets GTR off the hook for poor management of the franchise.
She explains: “It all started with the anarchy in summer 2016, which has nothing to do with the strikes. For us, the Southern crisis happened and the strikes are incidental.
“They have successfully managed to bury
what’s happened, and there’s an effort now to rewrite history. You can’t just blame staff and get away with horrendous things, and we don’t want to let them get away with it.
“The Gibb report was written between September-December 2016 when there were drivers’ strikes, and he didn’t talk to the unions at all. He’d only been told about sickness rates by the DfT and GTR, but they’ve not been proven.”
While the Southern campaign remains its most immediate priority, ABC Commuters says it is still committed to campaigning for a safe, affordable, accessible and reliable transport system across the UK. It is for these reasons that the group has also become involved in the wider stalemate over DOO and disabled access.
Having filed a Freedom of Information request, ABC Commuters scored one of its biggest exposés to date in July by revealing a letter sent by the Government’s Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee (DPTAC) to the DfT’s Managing Director of Passenger Services Peter Wilkinson in April 2016.
In the letter, DPTAC appears to warn Wilkinson of the adverse impact that DOO trains could have on disabled and older people (see below for an extract of the letter).
According to Yates, this vindicates some of the arguments used by RMT to guarantee guards on DOO services, which she feels the national media could have done a better job revealing.
She adds: “It’s all about accessibility and defending passengers’ rights. We’re not just talking about wheelchair users, but the whole spectrum of disabilities. There’s a lot of people living with stress and anxiety. It’s so obvious on a rural network like Southern, and we’ve published reports and leaks which validate what we’ve been saying for two years. It’s been willfully buried, which makes me very angry.”
With RMT industrial action continuing on SWR, Northern and Southern, ABC Commuters is now preparing to support the reported interest being taken by the Equality and Human Rights Commission into potential breaches of the Equality Act, where disabled persons are either unable to board DOO services, or provided with sufficient assistance or alternative arrangements.
There is no suggestion at this stage that any train operator is currently in breach of any accessibility legislation, but investigations are expected to continue.
“We know if you run DOO in a rural area then you’re setting yourself up to breach the Equality Act. What kind of country do we live in if we even have to discuss that?” asks Yates.
“Are taxis a reasonable adjustment? The simplest way to look at it is that DOO should never happen at an unmanned station. It can’t be in any passengers’ interest to have a 12-car vehicle without a second person, regardless of any reduction in dwell time.
“Inevitably there will be an Equality Act challenge to change the law, and sadly it will probably be at the taxpayers’ expense to prove the rights of disabled people. Why doesn’t a responsible government just say this isn’t right?”